Perhaps only a few academics have heard of the "Oracle." They may well have marked his (or possibly, her) essays and assignments, however.
Operating via Internet sites, the Oracle is a symptom of the increasing professionalism of student plagiarism.
"It's a little cottage industry," says Robert Clarke, lecturer in the department of computing at the UK's University of Central England.
And not so little either. A major conference on plagiarism in the UK next week will hear about an investigation by Clarke and his colleague Thomas Lancaster into the world of contract plagiarism.
They monitored a legitimate Web site on which small companies advertise for software to be written but which found 12 percent of its business was students asking for bids to write their assignments.
They discovered an international trade through which UK students, for example, could get computer assignments written by students or graduates in India or Eastern Europe. Rates there are as low as US$10 or US$15 to, say, write a piece of computer code for a student who is struggling to keep up with the work, panicking on a deadline or simply lazy.
Over the course of a year, the university's lecturers found the average student on the site was posting four to seven assignments to be done by someone else. In other words, they were repeat offenders, apparently getting good results and getting away with it, Clarke says.
They also discovered "subcontractors" offering between 50 and 100 assignments (and in one case more than 200) for bids and acting as middlemen between cheating students and the writers.
Clarke was tipped off about the Rentacoder Web site when one of his assignments appeared on it. He was able to track down the student concerned and warn her off.
"We believe we have got the situation under control," Clarke says.
He now tips off other tutors as he found that clusters tend to appear at particular departments as the word gets round a group of students. If this sort of cheating becomes endemic on a course, it is very hard to eradicate, he says.
Suspicious similarities
Part of his department's anti-plagiarism policy relies on technology. The Internet has made lifting material easy, but software such as Turnitin, used by universities' plagiarism advisory service (JISC-PAS), makes it possible for a lecturer to compare an assignment against billions of published papers and students' essays to spot suspicious similarities. Turnitin can also provide proof if it comes to disciplining a student. As Clarke remarks, "You can't just go around accusing students of cheating."
The software makes it possible for Clarke to scan all programming assignments or final dissertations -- previously almost impossibly laborious -- and he makes sure students are aware this is done. (It doesn't take academic studies to show that cheating is more common where students perceive the risk of detection is low.)
But another line of defense is a return to the old-fashioned viva voce (oral) exam in which a student has to discuss his or her work.
"We don't interrogate them about cheating, but it's an opportunity to show they have got the depth of understanding about what they are doing. It has an educational value, but it also detects students who haven't understood the work and have copied it," Clarke says.
There is a growing recognition that plagiarism is partly the fault of universities failing to explain the rules of the game to students, who are used to cutting and pasting material from the Internet at school. They confuse freely available material with "free to use" and fail to acknowledge sources, says Northumbria Learning, which operates the Turnitin software.
Schools are now also having to face up to the problem -- last week the Edexcel exam board announced it would be using Turnitin to check on this summer's public examinations' coursework.
Dame Ruth Deech, the independent adjudicator for higher education, will tell next week's conference, to be held in Gateshead in the north east of England, that institutions must be upfront about plagiarism and then make sure their procedures are applied consistently. Some universities take a more draconian line than others, but providing they have promulgated the rules and followed them consistently, the office of the independent adjudicator would uphold such decisions, she says.
Less than 3 percent of her cases, or about 15 a year, are appeals about plagiarism and she says students tend to complain that the penalty is too harsh or that others got away with the same behavior, rather than denying it altogether.
Sally Brown, a professor in charge of assessment, learning and teaching at Leeds Metropolitan University, England, says universities should aim to "design plagiarism out of the student experience." That means not setting simple questions such as "What were the causes of the Second World War?" Assignments in which students have to reflect on their own progress, or draw on personal experience, are much more difficult to plagiarize, although she admits they are more work-intensive for academic staff. "But the learning payoff is better in any case."
But in a robust counterblast to the "plagiarism police," Peter Levin, of the London School of Economics, says the problem is that students are not being taught how to write essays and assignments at high school and beyond.
Creative commons
"More fundamentally, the present role of the plagiarism police in promulgating the Turnitin culture, in which ideas and writings are treated as commodities, needs to be challenged," he says in a paper -- which he states must not be used by the Turnitin database for commercial purposes. "Ironically, Turnitin is taking millions of previously submitted papers, in each of which the copyright resides with the student author, and -- without the freely given consent of the author -- using them to make money. There appears to be some divergence here from the supposedly ethical stance adopted by the plagiarism police. Although the author is not being deprived of his or her work, and no criminal offense has been committed, the terms `stealing' and `theft' do rather come to mind," writes Levin.
His proposal is to publish all student writings that gain a pass grade on the Web under a Creative Commons license. Students' understanding of a topic would be tested by asking them to synthesize a unique handful of these essays into an essay of their own.
Levin adds: "Learning would be -- as it should -- a matter of gaining, assimilating and building on knowledge and ideas from any source. Teachers could go back to teaching. And essay sellers and the plagiarism police would go out of business."
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